Sunday, October 26, 2008

Interesting Datapoint...

I ran across this article measuring preference in the upcoming Presidential election for an interesting group: Russian immigrants. It's short, so I've reprinted the entire thing:
U.S. Russian community will vote for John McCain - poll

MOSCOW. Oct 24 (Interfax) - The majority among the Russian community in the United States are going to vote for Republican John McCain at the U.S. presidential election, the Moscow Bureau of Human Rights (MBHR) told Interfax on Friday, after conducting a survey among the Russian community in the U.S.

MBHR experts are monitoring the U.S. elections and are planning to be in the U.S. on election day on November 4, human rights activists said in a statement.

MBHR cited figures provided by the institute for studies of new Americans, which conducted a social poll among Russian immigrants in New York, California, Georgia, New Jersey, Florida and Massachusetts between August 30 and October 10 in cooperation with the American Jewish Congress.

"Of the total number of respondents 79% (80 % New Yorkers) are certain to go to the polls. Fifty-six percent (65% New Yorkers) are going to vote for John McCain, 10% - for Barack Obama. Twenty-eight percent (19% New Yorkers) are still undecided. Of those who are likely to go to the polls 63% will vote for McCain, 11% for Obama, and 25% are still undecided," MBHR said in the statement.

Four percent of respondents made donations to the Obama campaign, MBHR said in the statement.

During the U.S. census in 2000 almost 2 million Americans claimed their Russian roots and approximately the same number said the USSR was their country of origin. After Poles (over 6 million) the Russian-speaking community is the biggest group speaking one of the Slavic languages in the United States.

New York has the greatest number of Russian-speaking American residents.
These are people with experience living under a socialist government (the Soviet Union after about 1955 was really governed more as an extreme socialist country than as a Communist one). Interesting that people with this experience reject Obama so overwhelmingly...

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